Cleaning up the G73JH-B1 for sale

I plan to replace my current Asus G73 JH-B1 with a G75VW-DS72. A friend of mine agreed to buy it off of me, because her son needs a laptop to play some light gaming.

I did a clean install of windows about a month ago on the machine. So I don't see the need to do another one. I just plan on cleaning it up a bit before selling it. vBios has been flashed, and BIOS is at 211 (which is I believe the most stable version at the moment, I could be wrong though but I don't plan on flashing it. The son can do it himself if he feels like it needs it). And the graphic driver is the default version.

Here's where I need some pointers:

- What would I need to clean the rubbery exterior?
- I see debris on the speaker filter right below the screen, do I need to take off the entire top layer to clean that?
- I want to do a good defrag of the two hard drives, which I've already merged into two partitions instead of the 4 it came with. I've actually had a bad experience with defragging in the past where the windows defrag actually bricked an older laptop. And I was wondering if there's a third party defragging tool that I can use (like defraggler maybe? I'm pretty sure you guys can suggest something better).
- I usually don't buy into the "registry cleaning" stuff. But is there something that someone can suggest to do a general clean-up? LikeI mentioned before I really don't feel like re-installing windows and the default drivers again.

Thanks in advance folks.

 

Soft soap and water to clean the rubbery exterior, use a micro fiber cloth.
The speaker grill is a real pain to clean, a toothbrush, canned air and a whole of patience is what i usually use. It won't be as good as new, but close enough.
Nuke the HDD's content before selling and by nuke, i mean write at least one pass of zeros over the entire windows partition of the C drive (not the whole drive, you don't want to nuke the recovery partition), nuke the second drive entirely. Then recover using the recovery discs, the recovery partition or do a clean install.

I know you don't feel like reinstalling windows, but if you don't nuke the contents of the drive, someone motivated enough could make your digital life miserable. It's not likely, but don't take the chance.

 

I understand what you mean. Having to reinstall windows again does seem a little daunting. But you're definitely spot-on about the security issues.

I guess that brings me to my second question though, you mentioned the recovery drive, and I was wondering if it is possible to reinstall windows from the recovery drive?

I can probably get a driver installation disk from Chasity's stickied thread on ROG.

EDIT:

I did a little more research, and it seems like I can do a factory install by tapping the F9 key during start up. I think this would be more preferable if it wouldn't require the use of disks.

Can that be confirmed by someone? I don't necessarily need a "clean" install because all I'm doing is selling the thing. If they want to clean it up that's really up to them.

 

Yes, you can do this, i've done it in the past.

 

That works out for me. Thank you very much tijo. Does doing that do a good job of erasing my stuff or do you think I still need one of those third part deleting programs to permanently get rid of them?

And I just realized that I have to find every single save file on the games I've been playing. Balls.

 

It doesn't wipe everything, but the data will not be visible, it could be partially recoverable using a program like Recuvra though. CCleaner has the option to wipe empty space on a drive, you could just use that. Be careful not to wipe the whole drive though. As for your saves, i'm betting some will be in rather different locations, most should be in My Documents.

 

Thanks for the help.

I plan on using Sdelete to erase all of the files pertaining to my work, including those google cached files that might be used to recover my passwords.

And THEN I'll use CCleaner to clean up free space only. And finish it off with a factory re-install.

I hope this would be sufficient.

 

There is a freeware out there that will "save your savegames"... I've used it and it worked great, but I can't remember the name. But with some googling you should find it. It goes through your computer and pulls together in an organized way all the savegames. Pretty neat.

 

Personally I would do a full image of your drive before you do anything else, that way you will have all you data on an external drive if anything goes wrong. All of the above advise is excellent, Tijo has taken me to school again.

 

One update:

I just realized that one of the first things I did was merge my partitions together when I first got my laptop. I believe most Asus G73-B1s came with 4 partitions over two hard drives. I personally thought that was incredibly cumbersome so I merged the 4 of them into two.

So now I have a OS (C Drive as my main drive with the Operating System, and a SDATA1 (F Drive as my sub drive.

Now since I plan on only committing to a Factory Install, I'm wondering if I can somehow find out if my Recovery Partition still exists. I did a little googling and it seems like if you want to perform a F9 at Boot factory re-install your recovery Partition needs to be intact. Unfortunately when I first merged my partitions I don't recall seeing a 5th Recovery Partition so I didn't really think about it that much. My fear now is that merging my 4 partitions might have killed the Recovery Partition, which would mean a Factory Install is out of the question.

 

The recovery partition is hidden, go into disk management, there should be a partition that is ~19.5GB at the beginning of disk one reading as empty. It's the recovery partition and it's not empty.

 

Such concise and useful answers tijo. I could kiss you on the mouth.

I'll just rep you for now though. Much thanks again. Fingers crossed, I'm going to attempt this tomorrow.